Please help with creating my very first action.

[jammer_jammer]

<p>I've had PS for I don't know how many years now and I am just now experimenting with my very first action. I don't know what in the heck I was waiting for. Even though I'm not making it work quite right as of yet, this is as exciting as hell!</p>

<p>OK, this first action that I am trying to record is a copyright watermark. I create a new action, name it and start recording. During the process of making the watermark, I type out what I want and then do a layer style to get a drop shadow and set everything there just how I want it. Then I line things up vertically and horizontally and stop the recording.</p>

<p>So with my first and second attempts at recording and then using this new action, when I play the action on a new file, all that is written to this new file is the first step of typing out the text. In other words, it appears that none of the drop shadow settings were recorded. I've tried recording and using this action twice with the same result.<br>

Do you have any idea what I'm doing wrong that would make it so that none of the layer style settings are being recorded in the action?</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

[josephbraun]

<p>everything sounds good to me.</p>

[ronald_moravec1]

<p>You need to set stop points in the action where manual intervention is required.</p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Yeah, me too but what do I know. ; -)</p>

<p> I wondered if it would make any difference if I rasterized the type before doing the layer style so I just now gave that a try but it didn't make any difference. When trying to play the action on a new image, it still only plays up to the pointt of typing out the text, skips all of the layer style steps and moves right on to flattening and saving.</p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Ronald,<br>

Thank you, what part of this action would be considered manual intervention. Please excuse my ignorance. I'm new to this.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>After you do the drop shadow, try merging the text layer and effect layer. This is done, when selected on the text layer, go Layer/Merge Down. Then stop recording.</p>

<p> </p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Is that any different than just flattening the entire image as I did?</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>Not sure. Actions can be finicky and sometimes you have to go through simple stuff like that.</p>

<p>My best luck with making copyright actions was by making a tranparent image and doing my text on it. Save and close. Re-open, do cntrl-a then cntrl-c (select all, copy). This is kept in the clipboard. Then start your action and cntrl-v (paste) and it should paste your original transperent as a layer. You're telling the action to paste what is in clipboard. Then carry on from there with flatten layer, sharpen, convert to srgb, change mode to 8 bit, save as jpg etc.</p>

[ronald_moravec1]

<p>Where you set everything "just the way you want it" The action will make the drop shadow, but if there are no perameters selected on how you want it made, it will not know what to do. If you can not save the drop shadow size and position as a named preset, then put a stop in the play and perform that manually.</p>

<p>I do this with sharpen function. I can not tell it to do sharpen, because it does not know how much. I go into USM or Smart shatpen, do what I want, then save setting as x. When I record the action, I call out sharpen, then recall saved setting x. The option is to put a stop in the play with the check box, do it manually, then hit play again and it finishes.</p>

<p>It is simply a dumb computer program and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do, no more, no less. When you make a programing error, one of two things happen. Either it stops or skips a step.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p><em>I can not tell it to do sharpen, because it does not know how much.</em></p>

<p>Sure you can. When you are recording and apply Smart Sharpen a whatever levels, the next time you run the action, it will apply SS at those levels. I have many smart sharpen actions for different sized files and different iso.</p>

<p><em>The option is to put a stop in the play with the check box, do it manually, then hit play again and it finishes.</em></p>

<p>This seems a bit odd to me. The point of writing actions is so one doesn't have to baby sit them. I run actions on 1200 images, including smart sharpen, then go walk dogs. Come home and they're all done.</p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Thanks again guys.</p>

<p>Yeah, I was hoping to create and action that didn't need my interaction, as Garrison has pointed out, otherwise I'd have to be sitting at the computer for each image which isn't what I wanted to achieve.</p>

<p>Garrison,<br>

I tried the method that you use and got it to work finally. At first, all I was getting was the same thing, in other words just the white text as apposed to the text with the layers styles I had applied. I finally figured out that I needed to save the watermark in png in order for it to work. I kind of stumbled across this by shear luck.</p>

<p>When I did get it to work, I was pretty excited I've got to say, particularly because I used F2 as the button to use in order to play the action. I was pretty happy when I hit F2 and watched my watermark appear in less than a second! The mind boggles with the time saving possibilities of using actions now.</p>

<p>The one thing that bothers me about your method though is that you do have to find, open and copy the watermark each time you want to use the action. I'd love to find a way around this.</p>

<p>Here is a short 5 minute video of the technique that I first tried to use. <a href="

<p>No where does he mention having to do anything as far as creating a stop. I've followed the video about 4 times now and still, the text is only rendered as plain text with none of the drop shadow and fading effects that I recorded. I'm not sure what I'm missing there.<br>

Garrison, in order to use your technique, I'm forced to create two different watermarks, one for horizontal shots and one for vertical shots.</p>

<p>In and ideal world, I wound like an action to apply my watermark without having to open and save an image to the clip board and also, an action that would automatically know whether to apply the horizontal watermark for the landscape shots and or a diagonal watermark for the portrait shots and I would want to be able to do this to batches of images.</p>

<p>If anyone knows how to do this, I would still be really interested in the technique or if someone could just point me to a step my step tutorial on how to achieve this, that would be great.</p>

<p>Thanks again for all the help guys. I appreciate it. I feel like I'm on the cusp of a very new and excited tool here as far as automating some of my work.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I wrote with the clipboard method as I have various watermarks and various sized images. I have a folder titled "Watermarks" and it is my half dozen images for me to chose from. Depending what I am batching and needing the watermark, depends on which file I open. It takes just a quick second to open the file, select all, copy, and then hit run on the action. I found one action that was written to paste the clipboard more versatile than a half dozen actions for each possibility.</p>

<p>I've made various styles of watermarks over the years. Some centered, some with opacity knocked down to 35%, some with drop shadow. The easiest way to get them to fit both horizontal and vertical images is to take a portrait orientated image and make the watermark for it. It will fit on horizontal of course. To center them, you will have to go to layers/align layer/horizontal center and vertical center.</p>

<p>Are you writing this action so it works with The Image Processor?</p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Garrison,<br>

I'm not sure what you mean by "The Image Processor". Are you talking about PS or my image browser?</p>

<p>If PS, yes, that's what I'm using. As far as the image browser I'm using PS bridge but I wouldn't know anything about having the action work within bridge.</p>

<p>Please explain a little further what it is you are asking and what it is that you'd like to tell me about this.</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I assume you are converting one type of file to another? From a raw to a small jpg for the web? In Bridge, select the raw(s) that you wish to convert to jpg. At the tool bar go Tools/Photoshop/Image Processor. This is my favoriteway of converting any image to any image. At the bottom of the dialoge box in The Image Processor, there is a check box to include an action.</p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>Oh. OK. Gotcha. I'll check that out for sure. Thanks.</p>

<p>My typical scenerio is to convert my raws to tiffs in Raw Therapee. I then do the majority of my editing in PS. I keep the edited tiffs so I can go back and convert for any output size whenever I need to. I then convert the tiffs to jpegs for the web usage.</p>

<p>Thanks again for all your help.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I'm curious why you chose Raw Therapee over the raw converter in PS?</p>

<p> </p>

[jammer_jammer]

<p>I like it's highlight recovery tool. I only have CS2 at this point and I don't believe the ACR that came with it has highlight recovery. I don't need it real often but when I do, it's pretty nice. Also, I just really like the user interface in Therapee. Truth is, it doesn't much matter for me because I don't do any more than exposure adjusting and highlight recovery. I prefer doing everything else in CS2, using the TIFF file. Probably not what most would say is correct but it works for me and I'm comfortable with doing it that way. A TIFF can always take whatever I dish out. : -)</p>